Cisco StackPower – Port Issues

I have recently been battling with Cisco Stackpower issues and commands that have been difficult to find. In one environment the company uses 3750X series switches exclusivly in large stacks to avoid a spending cap on single items. Instead of buying blade switches we stack 24 port gig PoE 3750X switches. As an added benefit, with Stackpower we can make the switches redundant without buying additional power supplies. They will also distribute power if PoE devices are unevenly distributed to one switch or the other. Unfortunately when configuring Stackpower, not all ports are active at first, and sometimes the power sharing mode may be configured as something other than “sharing” by default.

First off we have a stack of eight 3750X switches. Obviously Stackpower in a redundant ring topology limits you to four switches on each power stack. You will want to issue a few show commands to see what is going on with Stackpower and the power supplies:

switch#show env power all

This show command should give you an overview of the installed power supplies and switch numbers.

Once you have all of the stack-power ports enabled, the next step is to place them in stack power groups (if they didn’t automatically assign). Remember that when changing group membership, the entire stack must be reloaded.